We need to rethink the relationship between mental health and political violence

Mourners near the Olympia shopping centre in Munich, after a shooting on June 23. Credit: Jens Meyer; AP/PA. All rights reserved

After each atrocity, social media hosts the
well-rehearsed rituals of mourning. News of the identification of the
perpetrators is frequently followed by condemnation of the double-standard of media
coverage – in relation to geography (sometimes misguided), and to
language, particularly regarding the word ‘terrorist’. (It’s worth reading the
BBC’s guidance about why it
prefers not to use the term altogether). In recent months, it has become clear
that there is frustration about the application of mental health diagnoses, especially
in relation to white male violence, as well as confusion about the relationship
between mental illness and terrorism. This is a fraught and difficult subject, rarely
discussed sensitively on a platform such as Twitter, which rewards simplification and polarisation.

After the killing of Jo Cox, there was justifiable anger
at ‘de-politicisation’ of her murder: many media outlets chose not to highlight
Thomas Mair’s links to far-right white supremacist groups. His act certainly fits
the definition of terrorism (‘one who uses violence or the threat of
violence to further their political aims’) – although
this does not discount the possibility that Mair may suffer from mental
illness, nor does it negate the importance of a diagnosis. Rather than a
reductionist either/or (“Is it ideology, or is it pathology? Chemicals in the brain,
or ideas in the mind?”), it’s important to acknowledge that mental illness can be
a contributory factor, because violence is often a confluence of personal, social
and ideological elements. There’s a public bravura that prevents politicians
from acknowledging this nuance (those that dissent are forced to state the
obvious: ‘to understand is not to justify’) – all of which serves as an indulgence
of ignorance, a dangerous form of self-denial. The ‘lone wolf’ evolves in three key stages:isolation, inspiration, emulation.

Amid a wave of attacks from so-called ‘lone wolf’
terrorists, clarity and honesty is urgently needed. The ‘lone wolf’ evolves in three key stages: isolation,
inspiration, emulation. For a recent BBC documentary on the Unabomber, I interviewed
former FBI special agent Kathleen Puckett, a behavioural psychologist who
worked on the UNAbom task force. Following
the capture of Ted Kaczynski, Puckett was commissioned to write a report called
‘The Lone Terrorist’, comparing the Unabomber with other high-profile cases,
including the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and Eric Rudolph, who bombed
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Puckett told me about the report:

Essentially the primary finding was that all of them had
an intense desire to be a part of a group… There are people who want to be
members of groups but can’t affiliate or can’t make the internal connections
with other people well enough to become a member. The group rejects them or
they reject the group. They’re angry because they’re stymied in their lack of
ability to make connections that they want. If you’re not in a group, how do
you matter in the world? How do you make a mark? You have to do a societal
level of violence – so the connection that they make is to the ideology itself…
We said years ago that what we were really worried about was the lone terrorist
ideology and phenomenon being adopted by international terrorism and of course
that has happened… It’s not that these people are being recruited but they’re
self-recruiting because they are alienated. The Boston bombers for example: Tsarnaev wrote
on his social media, ‘I don’t have a single American friend’.

In place of intimacy, ideology fulfils their desire
for connection. Isolation and
marginalization make them particularly susceptible
to online radicalization. Some are bullied, some experience racism, and
many entertain fantasies of revenge. Some, in Brian Michael Jenkins’ characterization,
are ‘stray
dogs’ rather than ‘lone wolves’, looking for a cause that will give them
meaning and make sense of their mental turmoil. Crucially, an extremist
ideology offers the possibility of transforming their
identity: to re-imagine themselves not as failures,
but as warriors, whose prior difficulties are not personal shortcomings, but evidence
of the cultural decadence that they now disavow.

While recognising the cognitive utility of radical ideology,
we shouldn’t discount the romantic appeal of the ideas themselves, even if the
creed seems dystopian to us. We live in an age that
is cynical about the power of ideas, too comfortable in its conviction that
people are ultimately motivated by materialism. This is a particularly modern
myopia, and prevents us from comprehending the inspiration of millenarian apocalyptic
groups, which offer a carefully crafted script for salvation. They tempt not
only troubled souls, but those weary of drab mediocrity, with the promise
of comradeship (personal or virtual, in the present or hereafter), glory on the
battlefield, and dominion over women, especially sex-slaves.
Jihadism transforms the fighters from passive figures into active
actors shaping history. In a world of bewildering complexity, it abolishes the ‘grey
zone’ and offers them purity and the prospect of hegemony. It is a mark of the parochialism and Eurocentricism of parts of the Left
that any analysis of this chauvinism is treated in purely reflexive terms, as solely a
commentary on the sins of the West.

A yearning for recognition among a community of
like-minded people leads to attempts at emulation. David Ali Somboly, who
murdered nine people in Munich before killing himself, sought
to emulate American high-school shooters, and join a roll-call of infamy. His
attack was timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the massacre of 77
people by Anders Breivik, whom Somboly admired, although it is unclear whether
he shared Breivik’s ideology as well as his appetite for mass murder. (Easy access to guns is, of course, the lethal ingredient). Somboly,
lacking the social skills to gain the respect of his peers, had to demand it by
terrorising them. Violence is a failure of the imagination. the threat posed has emerged from internal and external, personal and political factors; fanaticism is born in the friction between them.

After the murder of a priest on the
altar of a church in Normandy, a highly symbolic act of provocation, Le Monde announced
that it would no longer publish images of jihadis or reproduce their propaganda.
This is a welcome development. For jihadists producing slick videos of barbarism,
or for publicity-hungry fascists like Breivik, competing commercial media
networks have provided the perfect platform for broadcasting. In the UK, a
diagnosis of mental illness is often regarded as a ‘weak’ verdict, a dishonest avoidance
of punishment. In the case of political violence, however, such a diagnosis has
a disarming quality: it shatters the perpetrator’s delusion of grandeur and
deprives the act of ideological significance. Breivik, who fancied himself to be
a Jesticular Knight of the Knights Templar, fought passionately against his
diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia: he argued that to be treated in a
psychiatric ward is a “fate worse than death… To send a political activist to
an asylum is more sadistic and more evil than killing him”. A paranoid tabloid
culture, with daily tales of ‘swarms’
of migrants, is certainly not conducive to
ameliorating the problem.

In addition – and this is uncomfortable, because it
lacks a policy solution – there’s a reason why
the perpetrators of almost all (98%) of these atrocities are young men. Men are
not alone in wanting to die for an idea, but they are more willing to kill, and
more willing to assert ideological absolutism. The desire to fight – a trait shared by many young men – may be exacerbated by the perception of emasculation, a
sentiment popular on the reactionary right, which stokes a sense of cultural resentment.
(In relation to Trump’s support, Clay Shirkey quoted Franklin
Leonard: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”).

It’s
not a clear-cut case of either political grievance or personal victimization –
it’s often a kind of eclectic mix of these two things, so the personal is
political and the political is personal. The lone-wolf narratives are often
messy, they’re fluid, they don’t make sense, and they involve the more
desperate and vulnerable or marginalized individuals looking for a cause – and
often that cause is superimposed retrospectively, after the fact. You could ask
the question of whether it’s actually their true motive. It’s also got a lot to
do with these individuals seeking to become historical characters – the feeling
that they’re on a mission to actually hurt an enemy or, for the Breivik types,
to open the eyes of the broader population; they feel that they’re on the
vanguard of a movement and the broader population haven’t caught up with their
sense of threat.

Such a complex and diverse set of
interconnecting factors can seem bewildering – it’s not hard to understand why
voters are drawn to leaders who offer them simple solutions to a frightening
phenomenon. But simplistic solutions exacerbate the problem, as they attack
only one of the contributory factors, and in so doing create greater
alienation and radicalisation. It is not a sign of weakness to acknowledge that
the grave threat posed by 'lone-wolf' terrorists has emerged from internal and
external, personal and political factors; fanaticism is born in the friction
between them. This type of nuance separates us from the manichean fanatics, and
enables us – in the long run – to defeat them.

About the author

Benjamin Ramm is editor-at-large of openDemocracy. He writes features for BBC Culture and presents documentaries on BBC Radio 4. He tweets at @BenjaminRamm

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